Most effective use of IT to manage IT

Home >
Articles

2 September 2010

British Airways

25 February 2006

British Airways: Most effective use of IT to manage IT

Project: Integrated Applications Infrastructure

Business goal: To reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction by driving interaction through a set of integrated online applications.

Project partner: BEA Systems

Award sponsor: Atlantic Global

British Airways has streamlined customers' online interaction, while dramatically cutting its costs through the introduction of an integrated ecommerce application infrastructure. As a result, almost one third of BA's 27 million customers now use ba.com to book flights or manage their reservations and, at peak periods, 80% of the airline's UK bookings are handled over the web.

In recent years competition in the airline industry has been fierce: the emergence of 'no frills' airlines and a rapid drop in passenger numbers transformed the industry. In response, BA adopted a radical new strategy: Customer Enabled BA. IT was to play a fundamental role in this new strategy; BA needed to move customer interactions online, in order to streamline processes and simultaneously improve service. This meant ensuring that dealing with ba.com was so easy that customers would choose to serve themselves.

Highly commended:

Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein

Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein had a sprawling IT estate and needed to increase coordination and performance. A configured management database framework from Tideway Systems was implemented that automatically and actively captures and analyses infrastructure data, giving the investment bank's IT operation a much higher level of control.

E.ON

E.ON, the UK's second largest energy provider, needed to ensure that its IT processes supported its business and regulatory requirements. Critical to that push for better IT governance and compliance was the introduction of a change management solution from Serena Sofware. It enables the IT managers to view and control information and assets across the entire network.

But for this vision to become reality, BA had to integrate multiple back-end systems, including its product and fare information, multiple customer databases, the Amadeus global airline reservation system and the BA kiosk/desk check-in systems. The system also needed to draw on multiple other real-time data feeds, including fares and availability, content management systems and session data.

As the integration broker for these various components, the ba.com site uses BEA Systems' WebLogic Server. The result is a web site that has won praise for its high levels of interactivity and ease of use. And the customer numbers reflect this: 31% of all customers use ba.com to service their booking prior to arriving at the airport, compared to 19% just 20 months ago.

As well as the core task of flight booking, the site enables customers to review their flight schedules, compare upgrade costs, change seat allocations, specify dietary requirements, enter details required by US immigration and check-in within 24 hours of departure. More recently, the application suite has been expanded to enable customers on some routes to print their own boarding cards prior to travel.

The website is now the airline's primary sales channel and is credited with saving the company around £100 million each year - and largely by leveraging a legacy infrastructure.